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Anyone who runs a website, especially those who those who do the majority of their business through a web portal, know how important speedy load times are to keeping their customers engaged, on site, and happy. Of course, maintaining speed can be a tough proposition, especially for sites that serve a lot of data, or rely on a lot of moving parts or third-party integration to do business. But even so, maintaining that fluidity is paramount to providing an appealing user experience. While there are a number of sources one can turn to for website optimization, few offer both optimization along with the ability to track incoming pageviews and cross-reference their page load times with bounce rates — and most importantly — conversion rates.

That’s why Torbit, a website optimization company based in Sunnyvale, has launched a new product called Insight, which gives any online business the ability to track the correlation between the speed of their website and their core business metrics. Users can view site speed using real user measurement, and drill down to see precisely where pages are hitting snags — and what’s causing those hang-ups.

Torbit Insight is designed both for those looking to measure website performance for the first time, as well as those already monitoring site speed that want more accurate data. Monitoring and optimizing the front-end of your website to make it faster is important, but understanding the cause of speed issues, which users are being affected, and where matters even more.

Thus, Torbit’s solution gives users access to realtime data reporting in a live map view, along with a histogram of user load times that include metrics like your median and top percentiles, and your best and worst performing URLs across your site. This allows administrators and site owners to get a more nuanced breakdown of site speed to better understand the typical experience of your average visitor. And, with samples that are all-inclusive, users can see performance data for every visitor on every page.

What if you want to know if your last code deployment made your site faster or slower? Torbit enables you to view performance in real time to get a sense of how load times are changing as new features are added.

Torbit operates at 1-second resolution, which gives users transparency into site performance in real time. What’s more, Torbit serves its users with customized suggestions, based on their site’s particular issues, on how to optimize sites to make their pages load faster. As its monitoring tools give you a better way to find issues with your DNS provider or to find blind spots within your team, its suggestions can help you find the best ways to fill in those blanks.

Like most good measurement tools, Torbit also allows users to see how performance varies across different browsers and geographies, and correlate site speed to bounce rates, conversion rates, and revenue. Of course, these features are all well and good as long as the product itself is lightweight and easy to integrate. To address this, Insight uses a small JavaScript snippet to find the time it takes your pages to load for visitors, and itself loads asynchronously to prevent it from slowing down your site or causing issues elsewhere.

In addition to its launch of Insight, Torbit also pushed a new version of its homepage, which enables users to self-serve access to Insight. The product itself is free to use off the bat, with additional features and enhancements offered in premium packages at $24 and $99 a month. (More here.)

While Torbit initially seems like it would be a direct competitor to the fast-growing TechCrunch Disrupt runner-up CloudFlare, a service that optimizes both speed and security for any and all websites. However, Torbit Co-founder Josh Fraser (who scribed a guest post for TechCrunch last year) says that he sees Insight as a complement rather than a competitor, allowing CloudFlare users to measure the speed-up and performance boost of their websites. And since Insight is JavaScript-based, it’s easy for users to use it to get a baseline measurement before turning on CloudFlare.

Site Optimizer, on the other hand, is exclusively focused on enterprise customers, so while he allowed for the potential for future competition, he doesn’t see friction in the short term.

As to who’s using Insight? At launch, Torbit counted sites and networks, including Wayfair, BlogTalkRadio, Storenvy, and the Cheezburger, as those using Insight to monitor web performance and conversion.

Insight is definitely intended to be a “complementary” service, or gateway, to Site Optimizer, and it’s obviously a smart interplay that the TechStars founders have set up. Measure your site’s performance and conversion rates, then optimize it with their secondary product — or CloudFlare.

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CrunchBase

OverviewTorbit is a cloud-based website accelerator service that makes websites faster. Torbit's technology is built around many of the performance best practices recommended by companies like Google and Yahoo. Torbit speeds up your site by automating these performance optimizations that are otherwise tedious for you to do by hand.